The Festival of Doubt (FoD) is a gathering of researchers who are interested in artificial and biological Intelligent Systems and related areas. The centre of mass for FoD is the Complex and Intelligent Systems Group in the School of ITEE at UQ, but FoD is fundamentally an interdisciplinary group. FoD includes researchers from the wider School of ITEE, as well as from numerous other UQ centres (the Centre for Sensor, Signal and Image Processing (CSSIP), Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), Cognitive Science and Psychology, Maths, Economics, Neuroscience, Anatomy, English, Philosophy), from QUT and Griffith, commercial and Government organizations in Brisbane, and ex-participants and visitors from around the world. See the links page for a list of web resources for FoD-affiliated groups (and let me know if I've forgotten anything!).

FoD people are typically interested in things that fall under headings such as: Intelligent Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science, Pattern Recognition, Evolutionary Computation, Optimization, Bioinformatics, Neuroscience, Visualization, Complex Systems, Artificial Life and Intelligent Data Analysis.

The aims of FoD are:

• To provide a vehicle for interdisciplinary research and discussion amongst UQ and the extended community.
• To encourage researchers and research students to present and talk about their work, as well as to broaden their horizons on what else is going on around them.
• To lift our awareness of the literature and wider understanding of the field.
• To foster open-ended discussions of ideas and the pooling of intellectual resources - a chance to stop solutioneering and explore the open questions.

FoD meetings typically involve (informal) seminar-style presentations, discussion sessions, reading groups, etc. Presentation of research problems ("Surely someone has come across a problem like this before?!") as well as research results are strongly encouraged.

History: The Festival of Doubt was started by Marcus Frean in 1997 when he was a fancy-free postdoc at UQ. He has established a Wellington chapter of FoD - see here.